Is Your Website Too Slow for Google to Rank?

INTRODUCTION

Hey, what’s up everybody? It’s Craig Lillard here with The Traffic Show where we talk about ways to grow your business by bringing you more traffic. Today, we are going to talk about how to increase your SEO rankings with page speed.

SPEED MATTERS TO GOOGLE

So, a lot of you, look at your website and you think, “Hey, my website’s pretty fast, loads up pretty fast in my phone.” But, you don’t realize that the way that Google looks at your page is often different than the way that you look at your page. You may feel that your website is fast, but Google may feel that it is actually, scientifically not that fast, and Google has a way to rate your website to see if your website is as fast as it should be. What you need to do to see how fast your website is you need to use their free tool to determine that.

Now, why does it matter if your web page is fast? Google rolls in to all of their hundred or so ranking factors, page speed and they show you that it is important to them by creating this tool and the tool not only tells you how fast your page is but gives you way to improve the page speed. So, you know thatwhen Google’s created a special tool for that then it must be an important factor to them and the reality is if your page is faster than your competition the likelihood that your going to rank higher than them is reasonable.

(LACK OF) SPEED KILLS – CASE STUDY

So, I’ll give you an example, a recent client of ours came to me and we are redesigning some older websites and he said, “You know what, we’ve got this one web page that we had somebody redesigned for us. It used to be in the top ten of Google’s rankings and now it is gone. Nowhere to be found. That sounded really strange to me, I went and look at the site and the site loaded up nice and fast, it looked good, looked modern, design was okay. However, I went straight on to Google’s page speed tool and I typed in the URL for that site and out of a score from 0 to 100, this particular site came in at a 10, zero to 100, 100 being best, zero being worst, it was a 10.

The likelihood of him redesigning the site, but not keeping in mind these rules forspeed according to Google is what tanked that website is not guaranteed, but it is a good chance. So, today, I want to show you, how to use Google’s page speed tool in order to speed up your rankings. Cause as we know, faster websites equal more traffic. So, what I want you to do is to go over to Google page speed, I am going to give you a couple of examples of some popular sites that you know or have heard of.

HOW FAST IS FAST ENOUGH?

The first of these is, Zappos. So if you type in, just go to Google and type in Google page speed and it comes up as a first thing. So, Zappos here, here are the scores that Zapoos have. For mobile, it says “Needs Work” 75 out of 100. Now, here is the deal, dont be afraid if your score is in the gold section, see how this is gold, “Needs Work” is in gold. Gold or green, you’re golden, okay. Red, you’re in trouble and I believe somewhere under 60 or 50 is in the red zone. You dont want to be in the red zone. If you are in the red, you need to move up, if you’re gold, then try to get faster but dont kill yourself to get a hundred or anything because the reality is you’re going to have to sacrifice other things, the look, the feel, the user experience of your website to get the way up there. It is possible, it may not just be worth it. Cause as you can see, Zappos here, one of the biggest sites in the world is at 75 for desktop and for desktop, 66. Both in the gold.

Another example here, would be realtor.com, their mobile score is 66 and their desktop score is 79. Both of these scores are okay, they are not terrible scores and they are really good scores actually and if you can score in that gold level, then you are going to be in good shape, dont be in the red.

Now, let’s go down here and it will give you, if you scroll down this page, it will tell you some optimizations that you can do to spee up your website. If you dont know how to do these, then get your developer to do it, call us we can help you with it and you want to get your website up in to that gold section.

So, go to Google page speed, test your site up and see what’s going on. I have a blog that I am going to link to actually where we go over some code that Google gave us that you can use and put into your website to help speed it up and often it will drastically improve your scores on this Google’s page speed tool.

So, if this was helpful to you, give us a like, subscribe to this show by joining our facebook group, by liking our Facebook page or our YouTube channel.

Thanks so much everybody for watching. This has been Craig Lillard and this is The Traffic Show. Keep the traffic flowing!